Burning the Page: The eBook revolution and the future of reading

through a demo. I tell her that it would be nice if some sort of sticker on books inside the store would show if they’re available on the Nook. Something on the print book’s front cover, right there on the retail shelves. It’s the sort of thing that Barnes & Noble can do but Amazon can’t because it doesn’t have a physical presence.
    After a few minutes, some sweatered, grandmotherly looking men come over to look at the Nook, and so does a woman with so many facial piercings that she’d probably set off a metal detector. I slowly drift away.
    I love real-world retail. It connects you right to your customers, without the web as a nameless, anonymizing barrier. Bookselling as we know it emerged at the end of the Roman Republic, around 50 BC, at a time before publishers existed. Retailers would contract directly with scribes, copyists, and authors. Then they’d create lists of books for sale and post them for customers to see outside their stores on Rome’s winding side streets. Bookselling as we know it grew more complex with the proliferation of separate roles for authors and publishers and retailers, as well as the advent of copyright and of securing rights for publication, and the explosion of mail-order and online commerce.
    Though I’ve worked in online retail for two decades, I still never get tired of looking at bookstores. I’m a bookstore tourist whose first vacation priority on arriving in a new city is to check out the local independent bookstores. And I have a special place in my heart for Barnes & Noble, the biggest of the retail bookstores.
    They’re sharp on the ebooks side, as well. Out of all the retailers who sell dedicated e-readers, they’re the most innovative. They were the first to release new book-reading features and to innovate on the hardware side. They were the first to have touch-sensitive eInk screens. They innovated digital book lending for swapping books between friends. Heck, if you’re in one of their stores, you can read any Nook book for free for an hour or so. They totally get the social experience of books in the way that it crosses over from the real world to the digital.
    They can innovate so fast because they’re not burdened with their own R&D group. Instead, they use a company called Inventec, a sort of hired gun in the world of R&D. It’s a kind of Lab126 that hires itself out to the highest bidder. By outsourcing the nuts and bolts of their product development, Barnes & Noble can focus on innovation.
    Their Nooks are downright futuristic too. When I first got my own Nook, I was just as perplexed as everyone because it had a big eInk screen for reading and a thin color screen at the bottom for navigation. The day I opened my Nook for the first time, I was sprawled out on my living room floor like a child opening a birthday present. (Okay, a birthday present I had bought for myself.) The Nook’s dual screen is clever and innovative, even if it is neurocognitively jarring. (When you get confused by all the screens you have to navigate, that can take you out of the reading experience.)
    One of the reasons that Barnes & Noble makes such innovative devices is because they don’t have to worry about building their own operating system, unlike Apple and Amazon. Those two companies are slowed down by the boatloads of engineers who tweak and tune and build an operating system from scratch. Barnes & Noble simply uses Google’s free Android operating system, which lets the retailer put its engineers on other projects to make e-reading even better.
    Barnes & Noble is innovative with the software as well as hardware. For example, the Nook was the first e-reader with a game platform. So you have to give credit to every engineer and director at Barnes & Noble for what they’ve done.
    Even more so, what they did with interactive children’s ebooks threw the publishing industry for a loop. For the first time, you could actually play with an ebook. You could touch an elephant to hear it bellow, or you could become a character in the book. And it’s not hard to extrapolate from interactive children’s books to interactive books for adults or readers of any age.
    If you ask me, though, in spite of such interactivity, ebooks aren’t ready yet for children. I think a children’s book should be sacred and sensual, an inviting canvas for the imagination that can be colored in with crayons. For children, words are already puzzles. They’re strange glyphs that children